Eliana Willis

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US elections 2020

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Joe Biden said at a town hall event on Thursday night that he would announce before election day whether he favors expanding the supreme court.Biden has repeatedly declined to lay out a stance on the issue amid an ongoing Republican sprint to install a third justice nominated by Donald Trump before the election, in what critics have called a naked power grab.The Senate judiciary committee appeared poised to approve and hand off the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the full Senate next week.Barrett’s installation on the court would make for the most dramatic ideological realignment on the court in decades. In part that’s because she would replace a liberal justice, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.But the conservative court coup would also be the result of a successful plot by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to hold open a supreme court seat for almost a year in 2016 so that Trump could fill it instead of Barack Obama.That fact, combined with similar maneuvering by McConnell at the district and appeals court levels, have led Biden backers to express outrage that the candidate’s unwillingness to stake out a position on so-called “court-packing” would create controversy.The court has already been packed, Biden supporters say, by Trump, McConnell and their Republican surrogates and outside accomplices.In a town hall in Philadelphia on Thursday night, Biden sought to hold the focus on the Republicans’ conduct, telling host George Stephanopoulos that “no matter what answer I gave you” on court packing, “if I say it that’s going to be the headline tomorrow.’”As Stephanopoulos insisted on knowing whether Biden would encourage Congress to pass legislation to expand the court – all of this in the hypothetical instance in which Democrats win the White House in November, hold the House of Representatives, flip the Senate and then make court-packing a legislative priority – Biden said people would know how he felt “before they vote”.Barrett’s likely confirmation would establish a solid 6-3 conservative majority on the court that could last decades. Some progressives have called on the next Democratic president and Congress to add seats to the court, which would change the norm of nine seats that has been in place since 1869. Other activists have called for term limits for judges to increase court turnover.But none of those measures would be effective in the long term so long as Republicans in the Senate, whenever in the majority, refuse to fill court vacancies with judges appointed by a Democratic president and then pump those vacancies full when a Republican president takes over. More

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The Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, took to the stage in Pennsylvania in a modified town hall event, following the cancellation of the second debate. Biden gave detailed answers about his proposals on everything, from the coronavirus pandemic to tax reform – in a stark contrast to Donald Trump’s combative event  that took place in Miami at the same time 
Trump and Biden offer dramatically different visions at duelling town halls

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Joe Biden

Donald Trump

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US elections 2020

Today show co-host pressed president on debts, coronavirus and QAnon without letting president dominate More

US elections 2020

The president agreed to the forum after Biden’s campaign set up its own, with events airing simultaneously on different networks
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Donald Trump

Asked by host Savannah Guthrie if he would ‘just say it’s crazy and not true’, Trump says: ‘I don’t know about QAnon’
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Rudy Giuliani’s daughter has endorsed Joe Biden for president in an essay for Vanity Fair, writing that in this historic election “none of us can afford to be silent”.“My father is Rudy Giuliani,” Caroline Rose Giuliani said in the magazine. “We are multiverses apart, politically and otherwise. I’ve spent a lifetime forging an identity in the arts separate from my last name, so publicly declaring myself as a ‘Giuliani’ feels counterintuitive, but I’ve come to realize that none of us can afford to be silent right now.”The younger Giuliani, a director, actor and writer who lives in Los Angeles, endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and voted for Barack Obama in 2012. She writes that since childhood she has engaged in debates with her father about LGBTQ rights, policing and other issues.“It felt important to speak my mind, and I’m glad we at least managed to communicate at all. But the chasm was painful nonetheless, and has gotten exponentially more so in Trump’s era of chest-thumping partisan tribalism. I imagine many Americans can relate to the helpless feeling this confrontation cycle created in me, but we are not helpless. I may not be able to change my father’s mind, but together, we can vote this toxic administration out of office.”Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is a personal lawyer to Donald Trump and has been one of the president’s loudest endorsers, whether during the Russian investigation, the president’s impeachment or the coronavirus crisis.With less than a month before the 3 November election, Giuliani is back in the spotlight with claims to have found incriminating evidence on a discarded computer of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Twitter and Facebook have been restricting the dissemination of the New York Post’s article reporting the unlikely and unsubstantiated claim.“If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with ‘yes-men’ and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power,” his daughter writes.“We have to stand and fight,” she argues. “The only way to end this nightmare is to vote. There is hope on the horizon, but we’ll only grasp it if we elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.” More

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